Somehow SemiAccurate got their hands on an Intel R2000 Romley system, featuring a pair of E5-2600 running on a S2600GZ 2S board, in a 2U rackmount case. The performance impressed them as they had to create artificial loads to even try to stress the machine. That wasn't all that is impressive about this new platform; as it is designed as a server platform energy savings during low usage times is a key factor for administrators. Romley goes far beyond reducing frequency and power consumption when idle and actually has 16 power savings profiles which offers control far beyond what has been possible previously. As well there are large benefits to moving the PCIe controller onto the die, which you can read all about at SemiAccurate.

"To give you an idea on how good it is, SemiAccurate spent the last few weeks testing the Intel R2000 (Bighorn Peak) 2U platform based on the S2600GZ (Grizzly Pass) 2S Romley board, and it quickly became obvious we could not stress it with any real workload, only artificial workloads would make this beast sweat. I could not find a way to stress both the memory subsystem and the CPUs at once. To make matters worse, none of this touched the most important modern bottleneck, the network and I/O. Tests didn’t stress the platform evenly, what used to be system tests became subsystem tests, and were obviously the compute equivalent of makework."